The 1950s were so awful for me that they help me now survive the Covid years better

People think now during the Covid years is bad. However, the 1950s and 1940s and 1930s were worse. I wasn't born until almost 1950. First, my parents were Anti-Vaxxers so I almost died of Whooping cough before I was 2 years old. Then I got a concussion rock climbing with my father when I fell and hit the back of my head after falling about 8 or 9 feet onto my head. Luckily, I had a hard head or I would have died that day likely in 1957 at Chilao in the mountains above Los Angeles near Mt. Waterman at around 5 to 7000 feet in altitude with my Dad.

Then I had night time seizures from age 10 in to age 15 when they finally stopped because my skull or cranium grew enough to release the pressure of the dent in my skull upon my brain.

So, it was 1963 before my life started to get normal when I was 15.

But, before that I had whooping cough at 2 and i almost died from it and then a concussion at around 9 years old with my father and I wasn't ever taken to the hospital or to see a doctor until I was 12 or 13 years old because my Dad was sort of Christian Science in his medical beliefs and my Mom too. The fact that I was having seizures out of nightmares at night made my mother think I was a great man or a King Because of Alexander the Great and Napoleon were also epileptics. We didn't know then that is was a concussion I was dealing with which is sometimes called "Childhood Epilepsy" which is the only kind you can grow out of. I didn't know this  until my son became a nurse and he told me all this by the way.

So, the 1950s for me were pretty horrific going through all this and watching people get beat up at school and after school. I usually didn't get attacked or rolled down hills in trash cans or have my head put in a toilet with poop in it while they flushed it so the person didn't drown in the poop. I was more a protector of girls and smaller boys because I was usually a head taller than anyone else in my grade. So, if someone hit me I made it a point to hit them 5 time harder so they knew that if they messed with me I would put them in the hospital. So, I avoided serious fights this way. If you  hit me your arm or shoulder was going to hurt for a week or more.

But, whenever I could survive it I rescued smaller boys and girls from being beaten up or raped at school often. Some people would literally kill you if you tried to stop them hurting others. So, self preservation played into all this a lot.

This is just the way things actually were in public school in the 1950s even in Glendale California which was an all white and hispanic city then with no blacks.

But, even in Glendale there were the Khaki Boys who went to Roosevelt Junior high which was a Gang of mostly hispanic boys then.They wore white T-shirts and Khaki trousers and pointed toed black leather boots with a switchblade knife in a boot to cut people that pissed them off then. They were pretty scary to me when I was in Grade School then from 1956 to 1960. But, because of this gang my parents moved so I wouldn't have to go to Roosevelt Junior High school. Instead I went to Woodrow Wilson Junior High where all the rich kids went.

However, I was used to making friends by having to fight some with them first because Horace Mann school was about 1/2 hispanic. But, Woodrow Wilson Junior High had rich cliques that I couldn't break into so I felt lost there. So, I made friends with the type of people that had gone to Horace Mann school who were more blue collar and that I could better understand.

Most of the rich kids I knew were from church where my parents were the minister of until I was 12 from 1954 until 1960 when my mother's father died and she had a nervous breakdown when he died because many things were unresolved between my mother and her Dad when he died.

The 1950s would be for me my definition of what Hell was like. But, they helped me survive everything ever since and made me even more of a consummate survivor than I already was.  

So, Covid is nothing compared to trying to survive the 1950s in Los Angeles, California. I lived in Tujunga and Glendale, California from 1954 until 1969 when I moved first to Venice to work as an electrician and then to San Diego to live with my parents and go back to college. We lived first in Poway and then in Rancho Bernardo near Escondido in San Diego County then.